I feel better in other ways, too. Being in the cemetery makes me realise that dying is just ordinary. It happens to everyone, sooner or later. (Remember! You read it here first! Nobody else ever thought of this before!) I don’t feel like I’m on the outside, the way I sometimes do if my chemo is going badly, or if I get scared. You’re born; you do the best you can; then sooner or later, you die. I’m going to make sure it’s later for me, remember? But our cemetery helps me face up to things.

Sometimes when I think about what happened to people in our family — sailing all the way from Scotland, going blind, accidents, wars, earthquakes, protest marches — I don’t seem to have done anything in my life. Like I said, hardly any adventures. Except … you can have adventures in your mind as well. I see and hear. I think and I imagine. Heaps happens to me!

Just being in my family is an adventure. Remember how I said I’d love to play rugby for the Black Ferns? Well, even though she marched against the Springbok Tour back before I was born, my mum is a real rugby fan, too. Just about every All Blacks game, she’s in front of the TV, cheering and booing. I’m usually there, too — watching her as much as the game!

Uncle John says that when New Zealand won the very first Rugby World Cup in 1987, Mum and Auntie Kate charged around the lawn afterwards, yelling and dancing. Wish I could have seen that. They haven’t done much dancing since then; the ABs have been knocked out of every World Cup. Wonder if we’ll ever win again?

There’s other stuff I want to do. When Dad came to visit me and Mum a couple of months back, he told us how some of his aunts and uncles have been back to Scotland to look up their relatives. His family came out to New Zealand for the same reasons as Mum’s: to make better lives. Some of them stayed behind. Some who set out died from disease on the voyage, or their ship caught fire or sank in a storm. Now those families are meeting up again. That’s amazing. I’m going to do something like that when I’m well.

I was thinking about this the other day, while I sat on the rocks near where Grandad Alan and Tipene found the little carved panel. (And where they almost drowned. I can imagine my silly brothers doing something like that.)